Beyond the tears

POSTERITY frequently distorts, both its verdicts and its remembering unreliable. In the case of Dora Maar, currently the subject of a large-scale retrospective at Tate Modern—the first in this country and a joint undertaking with Paris’s Centre Pompidou and the J. Paul Getty Museum in California—she is chiefly remembered as Picasso’s mistress and the ‘weeping woman’ of a number of portraits he created in the late spring and early summer of 1937. ‘Dora, for me, was always a weeping woman,’